• Landslides claimed at least 90 lives in Kerala’s Wayanad on July 30. 

• The landslides triggered by heavy rainfall have left a trail of destruction in its wake, with several houses destroyed, water bodies swollen and trees uprooted.

• Mundakkai, Chooralmala, Attamala, and Noolpuzha villages were among the areas affected and cut off by the landslides.

What is landslide?

• A landslide is a geological event where a mass of rock, soil, and debris moves downward along a slope. 

• This movement can range from small, localized shifts to large, catastrophic failures.

What are the factors responsible for it?

Landslides can occur on both natural and man-made slopes. They are often triggered by a variety of factors, including:

• Heavy rainfall

• Earthquake

• Volcanic activity

• Human activities (such as construction or mining)

• Changes in groundwater levels.

Types of landslides:

• The term “landslide” describes a wide variety of processes that result in the downward and outward movement of slope-forming materials including rock, soil, artificial fill, or a combination of these. The materials may move by falling, toppling, sliding, spreading, or flowing.

• Although landslides are primarily associated with mountainous regions, they can also occur in areas of generally low relief. In low-relief areas, landslides occur as cut-and-fill failures (roadway and building excavations), river bluff failures, lateral spreading landslides, collapse of mine-waste piles (especially coal), and a wide variety of slope failures associated with quarries and open-pit mines. 

The most common types of landslides are:

1) Slides: Although many types of mass movements are included in the general term “landslide”, the more restrictive use of the term refers only to mass movements, where there is a distinct zone of weakness that separates the slide material from more stable underlying material. 

Major types of slides: 

i) Rotational slide: This is a slide in which the surface of rupture is curved concavely upward and the slide movement is roughly rotational about an axis that is parallel to the ground surface and transverse across the slide.

ii) Translational slide: In this type of slide, the landslide mass moves along a roughly planar surface with little rotation or backward tilting. 

iii) Block slide: A block slide is a translational slide in which the moving mass consists of a single unit or a few closely related units that move downslope as a relatively coherent mass .

2) Falls: Falls are abrupt movements of masses of geologic materials, such as rocks and boulders, that become detached from steep slopes or cliffs. Separation occurs along discontinuities such as fractures, joints, and bedding planes, and movement occurs by free-fall, bouncing, and rolling. 

Falls are strongly influenced by gravity, mechanical weathering, and the presence of interstitial water.

3) Topples: Toppling failures are distinguished by the forward rotation of a unit or units about some pivotal point, below or low in the unit, under the actions of gravity and forces exerted by adjacent units or by fluids in cracks.

4) Flows: There are five basic categories of flows that differ from one another in fundamental ways.

i) Debris flow: A debris flow is a form of rapid mass movement in which a combination of loose soil, rock, organic matter, air, and water mobilise as a slurry that flows downslope. 

Debris flows are commonly caused by intense surface-water flow, due to heavy precipitation or rapid snowmelt, that erodes and mobilises loose soil or rock on steep slopes. 

Debris flows also commonly mobilise from other types of landslides that occur on steep slopes, are nearly saturated, and consist of a large proportion of silt and sand-sized material. 

Debris-flow source areas are often associated with steep gullies, and debris-flow deposits are usually indicated by the presence of debris fans at the mouths of gullies. 

Fires that denude slopes of vegetation intensify the susceptibility of slopes to debris flows.

ii) Debris avalanche: This is a variety of very rapid to extremely rapid debris flow.

iii) Earthflow: Earthflows have a characteristic “hourglass” shape. The slope material liquefies and runs out, forming a bowl or depression at the head. 

The flow itself is elongated and usually occurs in fine-grained materials or clay-bearing rocks on moderate slopes and under saturated conditions. However, dry flows of granular material are also possible.

iv) Mudflow: A mudflow is an earthflow consisting of material that is wet enough to flow rapidly and that contains at least 50 percent sand, silt, and clay-sized particles. 

In some instances, for example in many newspaper reports, mudflows and debris flows are commonly referred to as “mudslides”.

v) Creep: Creep is the imperceptibly slow, steady, downward movement of slope-forming soil or rock. Movement is caused by shear stress sufficient to produce permanent deformation, but too small to produce shear failure.

There are generally three types of creep:

a) Seasonal, where movement is within the depth of soil affected by seasonal changes in soil moisture and soil temperature. 

b) Continuous, where shear stress continuously exceeds the strength of the material. 

c) Progressive, where slopes are reaching the point of failure as other types of mass movements. 

Creep is indicated by curved tree trunks, bent fences or retaining walls, tilted poles or fences, and small soil ripples or ridges.

5) Lateral Spreads: Lateral spreads are distinctive because they usually occur on very gentle slopes or flat terrain. The dominant mode of movement is lateral extension accompanied by shear or tensile fractures. 

The failure is caused by liquefaction, the process whereby saturated, loose, cohesionless sediments (usually sands and silts) are transformed from a solid into a liquefied state. Failure is usually triggered by rapid ground motion, such as that experienced during an earthquake, but can also be artificially induced. 

When coherent material, either bedrock or soil, rests on materials that liquefy, the upper units may undergo fracturing and extension and may then subside, translate, rotate, disintegrate, or liquefy and flow. 

Lateral spreading in fine-grained materials on shallow slopes is usually progressive. The failure starts suddenly in a small area and spreads rapidly. Often the initial failure is a slump, but in some materials movement occurs for no apparent reason. Combination of two or more of the above types is known as a complex landslide.

Govt initiatives to mitigate landslide risks

National Landslide Risk Management Strategy (2019):

• Comprehensive document addressing all components of landslide disaster risk reduction and management.

• Includes hazard mapping, monitoring, early warning systems, awareness programmes, capacity building, training, regulations, policies, and stabilization and mitigation of landslides.

Landslide Risk Mitigation Scheme (LRMS):

• Scheme under preparation to provide financial support for site-specific landslide mitigation projects recommended by landslide-prone states.

• Covers disaster prevention strategies, disaster mitigation, and R&D in monitoring critical landslides.

• Aims to develop early warning systems and capacity-building initiatives.

Flood Risk Mitigation Scheme (FRMS):

• Scheme under preparation to develop model multi-purpose flood shelters and river basin-specific flood early warning systems.

• Involves creating digital elevation maps for preparing inundation models to provide early warnings for evacuation during floods.

National Guidelines on landslides and snow avalanches:

• Prepared by the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA).

• Guides activities for mitigating landslide risks at all levels.

• Covers hazard assessment, vulnerability analysis, risk management, structural and non-structural measures, institutional mechanisms, financial arrangements, and community participation.

Landslide Atlas of India:

• Document providing details of landslides in various landslide provinces of India.

• Includes damage assessment of specific landslide locations.

• Prepared by the National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC), a center of ISRO.

(The author is a trainer for Civil Services aspirants.)